Battle of the Virus

On Christmas day I sat at the computer, installing the new Diablo Battle Chest game set I got. The game is kinda gory, but great fun. It's also really easy to play, no keyboarding, just the mouse and I have the mouse set really sensitive so I don't have to move it much. So basically I just sit back and click. A great distraction.

Anyway, I'm installing the game and getting updates online when all of the sudden....

And not just one, more than I could count. It was a Trojan Horse. And if you're familiar with the story of the Trojan war, then you can imagine what this virus did. Once it was "opened" it got everywhere. And I mean every where.

I spent the next several days trying to get ahead of it. The clever little bugger shut down my DVD drive, disabled the USB ports and even disabled the power button so I couldn't power it off. I'm not sure I would have anyway since it got into the root of my hard drive and set itself to format it on a restart.

I don't know exactly what I did to save it, but I was finally able to do a full virus scan and it found more than 100,000 infections. I didn't even know I had that many things on the hard drive.

I'm seriously thinking about setting up a duel boot on this thing with Linux. Almost everything I do there is a Linux eqivelent or an emulator in Linux. However, my kids may not like the transition, hence the need for duel boot.

My friend Adam recently made the switch completely to Linux. He's really happy with it. You can read some at his blog. I don't know if I'm brave enough to do what he did.